CNN reports that a paper prepared by a Stanford professor and graduate student has been pulled off the National Academy of Science’s website because officials at Health and Human Services considered the paper a "roadmap for terrorists." By explaining in some detail, evidently, how a terrorist might contaminate the nation’s milk supply, the paper sufficiently alarmed folks at FDA and HHS. HHS spokesman Marc Wolfson said he could not "recall another instance in which HHS has asked a scientific publication to withhold an article on national security grounds."
This report reminds me of the story about a George Mason Univeristy grad student whose dissertation was classified. In July 2003 GMU grad student Sean Gorman had mapped every business and industrial sector in the American economy, layering on top the fiber-optic network that connects them. The story in the Washington Post did a good job sketching out the dilemma the grad student found himself in. Nobody – not the government, not the power utilities, not the telecommunications companies -- wanted Gorman’s information to be public. Gorman became the poster child for the open vs. secure society debate.
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